


本当は

by orphan_account



Series: Fort Valla [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Japanese-American Character, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6805420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt: foreign/bliss</p><p>Two weeks before he leaves for grad school, Leo learns Japanese.</p>
            </blockquote>





	本当は

**Author's Note:**

> tell me where i left my mind  
> i lost my courage and my heart  
> got me wandering in [circles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOTq3LvAKx8)

Takumi is carefully tending to his mother's tsubaki, thinking about how he literally can't remember what they're called in English but he swears it wasn't hard, when Leo shouts, "Wait!"

Instinctively, Takumi refuses. He cuts off a stem. Then he immediately regrets it and whips around to snap, " _What_?"

Leo looks stupid with his head ducked out of their old treehouse window, pale hands gripping the edges Camilla started sandpapering when she found out about then-eight-year-old Takumi's splinter. He calls down, "Have I been saying your name wrong for the past two decades?"

"What?"

"Your name," repeats Leo, urgently. "Am I saying it wrong? Takumi?"

Takumi has to think about it to realize that Leo stresses the _ku_ , just like almost every other person has since his family moved to Long Island sixteen years ago. It stopped bothering him sometime in middle school, when his mother told him to be forgiving and let it go, to guard his name and know that when he hears it properly it's from someone that smells like home.

Honestly, if Leo hadn't just demonstrated, Takumi wouldn't even remember that he stressed it wrong.

"It took you that long?"

"You never corrected me," says Leo, his face scrunching up in offense.

"Uh, yeah, I did."

"What? No, you didn't."

" _Yeah_ , I did. A lot." Takumi puts his scissors on a lawn chair, twirling the murdered tsubaki in his other hand with a sigh. He climbs the ladder to the treehouse, a miraculous old monstrosity that still straddles the border of their respective yards. "Elise corrected you, too. You told her she was wrong and she told Xander and he grounded you for a week."

"What?" Leo scoots back against the wall to make room for him; they can't stand inside anymore, never mind hold secret meetings with Elise and Sakura and Elise's dog Arthur on what to do for Corrin's birthday. "Why would Elise correct me?"

"Because she pronounces it right," says Takumi. "Have you seriously never noticed? D'you need your ears checked, too?"

"Shut up." Leo pushes up his glasses.

"What're you even doing up here?"

"Studying."

Of course. Leave it to Leo to study on the two weeks of vacation he has before grad school.

Wait.

"Studying what? My name?"

"It's nothing," says Leo, then tries, " _Ta_ kumi."

" _Takumi_ ," Takumi corrects. "I don't really care, though. I'm used to it."

Evidentially Leo is the one who cares; Takumi can sense a personal betrayal at the fact that Mr. Pragmatic has been doing something _wrong_ for a significant period of time. But he doesn't say anything, staring instead at the tsubaki, pink-petaled perfection in Takumi's hands. They used to make flower crowns with his mother's collection; pink for Sakura and red for Elise, Sakura's carefully woven with Leo's thin, attentive hands, Elise's falling apart in Takumi's.

"It's really cramped in here," Takumi says. "I'm going back down."

"See you," says Leo. He's stiff, like when he realizes his shirt is on backwards and thinks that if he doesn't move, no one will notice.

Except it's on right. So why is he being so weird?

* * *

They're in Leo's room with an ancient copy of _Melee_ and Leo is owning his ass with Princess Peach, Takumi barely keeping up with Roy. Of course Takumi didn't expect to do any better now than he did when they were children, but Leo is straight up holding heavy conversation while Takumi is trying to concentrate.

"Corrin told me once that Azura only code switches to talk shit about white people in public," Leo is saying.

"Oh, yeah, we do that too," says Takumi, as Roy lands on a floating platform and Peach meteor smashes him to hell. He drops the controller to the ground in frustration, accidentally pulling at the GameCube.

"Wow." Leo's brow is raised.

"Not sorry," says Takumi, and collapses on Leo's bed, eyes trailing around the room. He's been here less and less but it hasn't changed since high school—wall after wall of bookshelf, filled with familiar fantasies and classics that Takumi has borrowed and dogeared and sent Leo at uni, organized by author and genre; Leo's walk-in closet, unopened college boxes neatly set against the wall; Leo's desk, textbooks piled open on top of each other, a Moleskine spread out and—

"Hey," says Takumi, sitting up. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Leo is awful at faking.

Takumi scoots up to Leo's desk and picks up his notebook, which reads in steady, too-precise katakana, レオ. The spine on one of the textbooks spells Leo's secret: _An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese_.

" _This_ is what you've been studying?"

"It's Elise's," says Leo, his ever-ready excuse. "She's taking it with Sakura next semester and wants me to help her."

"Oh my god," says Takumi, because, yeah, he believes _that_.

"I've already done Latin and French," Leo continues defensively, except that his cheeks flush in embarrassed rosy red. "I-I thought this'd be more challenging."

"Sure," says Takumi, and he's not sure what it is about this that's making him laugh—is it Leo actively needing a textbook for something Takumi doesn't, is it his face right now? Is it the image of Leo dissecting Takumi's language the same way he does math, puzzling together grammar to make logical ends meet, collected words like "sakana" and "ocha" his only previous knowledge? Or does it have something to do with Takumi taking one week of Japanese in college himself, storming out when the room full of weebs had the balls to ask him his favorite anime, and here Leo is with the same textbook, chipping away at the invisible awkwardness that arose every time Takumi's family accidentally slipped into his mothertongue in front of their neighbors?

He entertains, briefly, the idea of Leo studying with him in mind.

Which is stupid.

But a nice thought. He always does miss Leo when he goes.

"Why're you so embarrassed?" Takumi says, when he notices Leo is still pouting. "It's kind of cool. I'm a little surprised you didn't do it earlier."

"I thought about it a lot. But I only started now because I needed something to distract myself."

He means from Corrin, who used to live with them as a foster sister and dated him in university, before she left permanently to live with her cousin Azura—who never spoke a word of English around him if she could help it—without a second glance.

Takumi nods. "Sure."

* * *

Of course when he has somehow graduated college and lined up a tentative career nearby, his brain needs something else to be anxious about, so for the last two weeks of his youth it settles on Leo, on _An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese_. The ownership he feels over a language he can barely write is suddenly at its fiercest when his best friend knocks at its door. All Takumi really wants to know, he figures, is why.

"I don't get why you're freaking out," says Sakura, shortly after he accidentally mentioned it at dinner. Ryoma did nothing to ease his worries by laughing and suggesting to Hinoka that they call him _Ray-o_ from now on; Ryoma has always had an odd flavor of affection. "Elise _did_ ask him to help out."

"Why didn't you both just ask Hinoka? And," Takumi passes Sakura a washed plate and looks around, as though Leo will hear him through the kitchen window, "since when does he dote on Elise? It's _weird_."

Sakura towels off the dishware and sets it delicately on the drainer. Takumi always ends up smashing them if he's stressed. "Leo is Elise's favorite," she says. "I don't think they could really do without each other."

"Yesterday," Takumi presses on, "he called Xander 'Oniisan.'"

"That's cute," says Sakura.

"No," says Takumi, "it isn't."

"I think you need to let this go," she says, an echo of their mother's usual advice in a different phonology. _Takumi, fuu, fuu. Look, there it goes!_ "Elise wanted to call Camilla Oneesan, too, you know."

Takumi blinks. "Wait, Camilla."

"Takumi?"

"The flowers," he says. "That's what they're called in English, I couldn't remember. Tsubaki."

"Don't think that's right," Sakura says, gesturing to the picture on the fridge of their and Leo's family, from before Camilla moved away.

Takumi always forgets that Japanese, to Sakura, has withered down to the simplest of words, names of Asian spices and stock phrases like _hello_ and _nice to meet you_. He frowns, doubting Ryoma or Hinoka would remember.

* * *

Two weeks melt into one and Leo is moving again. He invites Takumi over to pack, 手伝ってくれますか?, but Takumi ignores the notification, stuffs his phone under his pillow, and climbs out the window and to their treehouse, where he finds the tsubaki dried out on the floor and his mother's comb under one of the secret boards. Running his fingers along the stem and the spine he also spies, against the same wall that Leo leant against when they talked about Takumi's name, another of his best friend's notebooks.

Naturally, he opens it. Sits cross-legged and feels an aching high schooler's nostalgia at Leo's small, fine script.

Episodic accounts of Fort Valla, of Arthur, of Sakura falling and breaking her leg. Of camellias. Of Corrin.

And in the margins of every last page, even in urgency neater than Takumi could ever:

タクミ

タクミ

タクミ

_this is fun to write_

He feels dizzy, then light. _I missed you_.

* * *

Finally, when he is found:

"Hey."

"Yo."

Shuffling, limbs sticking out of doors and windows. Then:

"Do you remember after Corrin left and we started hanging out more again when Hinata came up to you and said something and you blushed and he laughed?"

"Um," says Takumi, feeling a blush coming just at the mention of one, "no?"

"This is really selfish of me," Leo admits to cricketsong. "Truthfully, I don't want to lose someone else to something I don't understand."

Takumi's automatic response being, "There's something the valedictorian-bachelor-of-arts-summa-cum-laude-masters-candidate doesn't understand?"

He laughs. "Takumi. _Everything_."

Oh.

"Me, too."


End file.
